December 27: First Sunday after Christmas
Isaiah 61:10-62:3
Galatians 3:23-25;4:4-7
John 1:1-18
Psalm 147 or 147:13-21
On Christmas morning, I conducted a Scripture service at the Rehab hospital where I work. As I walked the halls of the hospital ahead of time inviting patients to come, I wasn’t sure anyone would. Most people were resting in bed, glad to have a break from therapy on this holiday. But a nice-sized group finally did assemble, and as I looked at their faces gathered around the table in the room where we conduct our Scripture service, I saw Jesus in each one of them. Gathered around the table in their wheel chairs, all of them struggling with serious health issues, they embodied for me suffering yet hopefulness, fatigue yet expectancy. “This is what it means to be human,” I thought. Each patient assembled represented for me the juxtaposition of struggle and hope, difficulty yet perseverance.
I’m much more comfortable talking about how I see the incarnate Jesus in the people I meet than wresting with the beautiful, poetic language of John in the Revised Common Lectionary’s gospel reading for today, the first Sunday after Christmas. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” What does this mean for those of us who have rather ordinary lives, who work and clean and laugh and love and cook? Even in this Christmas season, most of us do not think too much about the Incarnation of Jesus and what it means for us as individuals. We are too busy with our ordinary lives. “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” What is John talking about here?
In his commentary on the Gospel of John, W. Hall Harris III writes that John in his description of the Word become flesh, “[portrays] a God so involved, so caring, so loving and giving that he becomes incarnate within his creation. ” Now this is something that we as Christians can relate to. All of us, whether banker or artist, waitress or retiree, need to be reminded that our God is a God-with-us, that in the midst of our rather ordinary lives that contain joy as well as heartache, delight as well as suffering, we are not alone. After all, this is a primary human concern – that we are alone, that no one cares, that we have been abandoned to face our struggles by ourselves. John reminds us that something quite different is actually going on, that God cares so much about human beings that God chose to become one of us.
As I looked at the weary yet hopeful faces of the Rehab patients gathered around the table at our Scripture service on Sunday, I asked them, “What helps you get through this time when you are stuck here in the hospital, struggling to get better, separated from your family and friends?” And their answer to a person was, “I pray.” Their prayers were ones of gratitude for the healing that had already taken place, as well as requests for patience as they traveled their individual roads to recovery. These patients, in the trust they exhibit and in their gracious acceptance of their health issues, teach me to also rely on the Word become flesh, Jesus the Incarnation of God, the One who is with us now and for all eternity.